> Articles about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning would also be subject to those rules.

Agreed. This is selective censorship by the HN moderators (which is fine, as it's clearly up to them as to what's deemed important here, but the rules for being flagged need to be more clear in this manner then).

just to be clear, flagged status is not a moderator action, but done by users.

My question wasn't about flagged status, it was about why this story was not on the frontpage (even though several posts about it at the time had tons of up votes and weren't flagged). I'm assuming the mods were preventing those posts from hitting the frontpage.

flagging impacts the ranking, even before a [flagged] tag is shown, so when you complain that the discussion about this is not on the front page but somewhere deep down the ranking, you are complaining about user flags. (And after a discussion got enough comments, which it did, all further submissions are duplicates in addition)

Of course we don't actually know that, but from what little the HN mods have indicated that appears to be at least part of the algorithm.

But moderators do sometimes manually save a thread from being flagged dead, which apparently they chose not to do in this case.

Very little coverage of Assange on TV News to be fair

I was puzzled that we had daily front page Assange Hearing discussions given the exhaustive global coverage the issue has had over the last ten years. Surely this was an instance of using HNs as a soap-box?

A common issue often discussed in those articles is the lack of coverage from news organization like those working for TV news.